Five views on the ‘Mother of All Bombs’ in Afghanistan

KABUL: The United States has dropped its largest non-nuclear bomb on Afghanistan, killing dozens of Islamic State militants in a dramatic escalation that US President Donald Trump said had been “very, very successful”.

Here are five other views on the use of the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb — dubbed the “Mother Of All Bombs” — for the first time in combat since it was developed in the early days of the Iraq war.

US Central Command

General John Nicholson, the top US commander in Afghanistan, told a press conference in Kabul Friday that the bomb was the “right weapon against the right target”.

“The enemy had created bunkers, tunnels and extensive mine fields, and this weapon was used to reduce those obstacles so that we could continue our offensive in southern Nangarhar,” he said, adding US and Afghan forces at the site had seen “no evidence of civilian casualties”.

Analysts

As the dust settled analysts also began to question just how much the sound and fury of the strike signified, with some suggesting the decision may have been “disproportionate”.

“The Trump administration made a lot of noise with this bomb, but the general state of play on the ground remains the same: The Taliban continues to wage a formidable and ferocious insurgency. ISIS, by comparison, is a sideshow,” Michael Kugelman of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington told AFP, using an alternative acronym for IS.

“Still, from a strategic standpoint, there is an unsettling takeaway here: The US pulled off a huge shock and awe mission against an enemy that isn’t even the top threat to the US in Afghanistan. The Taliban continues to sit pretty,” he said.